Animal Feed

The Food and Drug Administration, skewered in the early 1990s for its dilatory approval of new drugs, particularly those that some doctors thought useful against AIDS, in more recent times has been accused of a laggardly pace in the second of its purviews, protection of Americans against food-borne diseases. Stung, the agency has mounted a vigorous response: Earlier this month it banned all cow, sheep and goat tissue in animal feeds.

The Food and Drug Administration took steps Thursday to ban the use of cow, sheep and goat tissue in most animal feeds to ensure against the transmission of "mad cow disease," which has been linked to at least 10 cases of a fatal human neurological disorder in Britain. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala called the U.S. action "precautionary," because there have been no cases of the disease reported in the United States. Last year, the U.S.

The cows may be mad, but the French are furious: They may have unknowingly imported vast amounts of animal feed banned in Britain for fear it might carry mad cow disease. The science magazine Nature, citing British government statistics, reported Thursday that Britain sold France thousands of tons of potentially contaminated feed from 1989 to 1991 that it could not sell at home. France reacted angrily to the British weekly's report.

Rice bran--long consigned to feed for cattle and pigs--can now be rendered economically fit for human consumption, thanks to technology developed by Brady International of Torrance. Brady International announced shipment to two California mills Wednesday of its rice-bran processor, which resulted from a government program aimed at making better use of the world's present supply of rice. The development could also improve nutrition in this fiber-conscious country as well as abroad.

An American firm has installed the latest high-tech equipment on a state dairy farm here in hopes of helping the Soviet Union get more milk from each of its 40 million cows. Instead of a bell around its neck, every one of the 400 cows taking part in the experiment will wear a transponder, an electronic identification tag bearing a number from one to 400.

The price that BP Nutrition paid for Purina Mills, which controls about 10% of the U.S. animal feed market, wasn't disclosed. St. Louis-based Purina Mills produces feed for horses, cattle, chickens, hogs and other farm animals. The company employs about 3,000 at 70 plants in 32 states. BP Nutrition, a unit of British Petroleum, operates a major animal feed business in Europe.

Your front-page story of (March 4), "What's the Beef?" failed to take into consideration that higher consciousness is also a contributing factor to the decline in consumption of red meat. More and more young people are waking up to the fact that "meat is murder" (also the title song of an album made in England), and most people taper off of flesh food by first cutting out red meat, then chicken and then fish. Meat of any kind is not necessary to our diet and has been proven to cause all kinds of health problems.

Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret M. Heckler refused on Wednesday to impose an emergency ban on the use of antibiotics in animal feed, saying scientific evidence does not support a finding of "imminent hazard" in the practice. She denied a petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sought the ban on use of small amounts of penicillin and tetracycline.

The recent outbreak of salmonella poisoning in the Midwest--the largest epidemic ever recorded in the United States--has reignited an old controversy over whether the federal government should outlaw the low-level use of antibiotics in animal feed, a routine practice in the livestock industry since 1950. The drugs, given to protect the animals from disease and enhance their growth, are believed also to contribute to the development of bacteria strains that do not succumb to most antibiotics.

Antibiotics have been an effective means of combating harmful bacteria in livestock and poultry for the last 40 years. The drugs, such as penicillin and tetracycline, are also used to enhance farm animals' growth rates. However, critics claim that regular use of antibiotics in animal feed will ultimately pose a serious health threat to humans. Some researchers believe that this practice will create strains of super bacteria in meat-producing animals that would prove resistant to treatment.